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Apple's new headquarters lacks vision

Though the planned building has a futuristic gleam — Jobs told the council "it's a little like a spaceship landed" — in many ways it is a doggedly old-fashioned proposal, recalling the 1943 Pentagon building as well as much of the suburban corporate architecture of the 1960s and '70s. And though Apple has touted the new campus as green, its sprawling form and dependence on the car make a different argument.
— latimes.com

I really liked this review and the fact that someone in mainstream was finally questioning this campus and what it means. Particularly this passage

The more interesting question is whether a place like Cupertino can maintain its low-density sprawl in future decades, as the Bay Area's population continues to grow, and whether the council's enthusiasm for the new Apple headquarters can be read as an endorsement of a car-dependent approach to city and regional planning that might have made sense in the 1970s but will seem irresponsible or worse by 2050.

I only wish Hawthorne hadn't phrased this as a question of what the future might hold (and if then) and instead simply called the project "irresponsible" !

Ugh, comments over there are awful. No one seems to understand - and points, IMO, to our huge problems as a profession - that architecture is so much more than a building plunked down as a monument to a designer's ego. Apple products have radically changed the way we live in the world; I wish we architects were better at making the public understand that our built environment can also radically change - improve! - the way we live in the world.

Very interesting comments in the article. Reminds me of an old professor of mine who always reminded us that architectural critics are failed architecture students bent on teaching the rest of us the error of our ways since they could not make it into our world. I fully agree with Donna's statement that ..."that architecture is so much more than a building plunked down as a monument to a designer's ego", but unfortunately it is misconception that that our built environment can radically change the the way we live. For some reason, some if not many, architects have the notion that by creating a beautiful building, we improve people's lives. Sure, we may add some comfort and excite some senses, but we are artistic engineers not social engineers, that is the point architects need to understand.